This World Cup coverage is made possible through the generous support of Marty and Kathy Hall and A Hall Mark of Excellence Award. To learn more about A Hall Mark of Excellence Award, or to learn how you can support FasterSkier’s coverage, please contact info@fasterskier.com. There had been glimpses of Swedish firepower all day. Into the first exchange, Calle Halfvarsson (SWE) had shot through the field. When Federico Pellegrino (ITA) broke away on leg three, Edvin...
While the majority of the members of the World Cup squad are based in either Vermont or Alaska during the summer, 28-year-old Kevin Bolger has continued his streak of seasons spent above the 60th north parallel. FasterSkier caught up with Bolger just as he was returning to the U.S. from a few months of training in Sweden. Just before his return, Bolger had competed in the Alliansloppet rollerski races, taking place as part of the...
Not two weeks ago, despite the pandemic, it appeared the FIS World Cup had dodged the proverbial positive-test bullet. The Ruka, Finland round of the World Cup went down with fantastic racing, and, as far as we know at the time of dropping this episode, no positive Covid-19 cases among the athletes in Ruka. The cracks began to appear shortly after the racing in Finland concluded. Several of Norway’s star skiers independently withdrew from World...
Yesterday Norway announced it would cease sending skiers to the World Cups in Davos, Switzerland and Dresden, Germany due to Covid-19 concerns. Rumors swirled that Sweden would make a similar decision. Twenty-four hours later the Swedish Ski Federation announced they too would withdraw from December’s competitions. “We learned some lessons about the implementation of a World Cup competition in Ruka. We have found that it went well. But we may also have been lucky. As it stands,...
(This evening, the CBC reported that voters opposed to Calgary’s bid for the 2026 Winter Games won 56.4% of the vote. According to the CBC, these are unofficial results.) The Olympics are a global spectacle, but all politics is local. And when the two truisms go head-to-head in today’s plebiscite vote in Calgary, Alberta, local threatens to win. At stake is the future of one of three remaining host cities for the 2026 Winter Olympic...
Saturday was the second day of World Cup Finals mini tour, held in Falun, Sweden, which conclude the 2017/2018 season. Holmenkollen 50 k skate. World Cup Finals conclude with 10/15 k freestyle pursuits on Sunday. Falun mini-tour standings|
FasterSkier would like to thank Fischer Sport USA, Concept2, Olympic cross-country and biathlon cheat sheet, and not long after, we received a comment from a reader asking for a uniform cheat sheet. We, too, found ourselves sometimes befuddled. During Saturday’s skiathlon, this reporter found himself looking for the emblematic stars on the U.S. Ski Team’s new unis. There were stars, think Diggins and Kalla, just no obvious stellar-like branding on the USST suits. So for you and for us,...
Wolfgang Pichler, the coach of the Swedish women’s biathlon team, will not be allowed to attend the 2018 Olympics in PyeongChang, South Korea. The reason? He previously worked with Russian athletes who have now been convicted of doping violations. The German rose to prominence as a coach when he led the Swedish team during the time of Magdalena Forsberg, coaching Anna Carin Zidek and Helena Eckholm as well. But he then left the team and...
Welcome to World Cup Windup, where we check in with the top-10 teams from last year’s FIS Cross Country World Cup tour before the season starts with the Ruka Triple in Kuusamo, Finland, on Nov. 24. SWEDEN Overall in Nations Cup Last Year: Second Women’s Ranking 2016-2017: Second Men’s Ranking 2016-2017: Third Who’s Back: Stina Nilsson, second in the Sprint Cup and fourth in the World Cup overall; Hanna Falk, third in the Sprint Cup;...
FIS races are already being contested in Finland and Sweden this weekend, with most top Scandinavian racers sitting out but a few national-team members and others picking up their first victories of the season. The competitions in Muonio, Finland, drew the most diverse field, including racers from Norway, Russia, Japan, China, Canada, Estonia, and Slovakia, among other countries. In the men’s classic sprint on Friday, the home team got a win from Ristomatti Hakola; he...
There is no faking a smile. As a visual social-media feed, Instagram places a premium on how we’d like to be perceived by the viewing world. Instagram’s editing tools come with an assortment of beautifying filters. But smiles? Fake smiles are filter-proof. Although not a habitual Instagram poster, scroll through U.S. Ski Team (USST) athlete Liz Stephen’s account, @lizhillstephen — it’s hard not to notice her genuine grin and the smiles of those around her. Those...
Editor’s Note: The following is the fourth post in a series proposed by Maks Zechel, a 20-year-old Canadian cross-country skier embarking on his first season training abroad. He recently made the big move to Norway, where he’ll be training and racing with Team Asker for the next nine months. Through these updates, Maks hopes to share his personal “observations, stories, and lessons learned” to help close the gap between North American and Scandinavian nordic skiing. Previous...
It didn’t seem likely until the last second – but last season’s star sprinter has once again arrived on the World Cup circuit. Italy’s Federico Pellegrino collected his ninth individual win on Saturday in Falun, Sweden, nipping Norway’s Emil Iversen by six-hundredths of a second in a photo finish in the freestyle sprint. The winner of last year’s Sprint World Cup, Pellegrino didn’t make his first sprint final of the season until after Christmas. However,...
Most of the time, the FIS Cross-Country World Cup visits towns and ski trails the racers already know well. Some venues, like Norway’s Holmenkollen and Switzerland’s Davos, are visited every year. Others, like France’s La Clusaz, are on the schedule every few years but are still always popular. “I’ve been on the World Cup for ten or eleven years, and we go to the same venues all the time,” the U.S. Ski Team’s Liz Stephen said....
Another women’s 4 x 5 k World Cup relay, another Norwegian win. Yawn? Not so fast. While the team of Ingvild Flugstad Østberg, Heidi Weng, Astrid Jacobsen, and Marit Bjørgen may have picked up the victory, the women’s race in Ulricehamn, Sweden, was anything but dull. For one thing, it was the closest race in 23 months, going all the way back to the 2014 Olympics where Sweden took gold. The top four teams all...
FIS Cross-Country World Cup (Ulricehamn, Sweden): 4 x 5 k and 4 x 7.5 k Relays Women’s report Norway notched back-to-back team victories in the women’s and men’s relays on Sunday at the World Cup in Ulricehamn, Sweden, with Finn Hågen Krogh securing a win in the men’s 4 x 7.5 k relay by 0.5 seconds over Sweden’s Calle Halfvarsson and Canada’s Lenny Valjas. With two kilometers remaining, nine teams were within 3.8 seconds of first. Krogh...
It’s not like winning is a new feeling for Canada’s Alex Harvey. After all, the Quebec-based cross-country skier said in a Cross Country Canada press release. “It is nice to be able to own a statistic like that, but I do it for the result and to be the best I can be each race. If that means that I win back-to-back then that is a bonus.” With Strong Performances, Canada Looks to Relay While...
It’s a new season on the International Biathlon Union (IBU) World Cup, but the Norwegian biathlon team made it clear that they didn’t want anything to change: just as they won the World Cup mixed relay trophy in 2016, they picked up a 33.7-second win in the event in Östersund, Sweden, on Sunday to kick off the new year. And just as he had so many times before, it was Ole Einar Bjørndalen — the “King...
Note: This Olympic roundup has been updated to include Czech skier Eva Vrabcová-Nývltová, who placed 26th in the women's marathon at the Rio Olympics on Sunday.
All right, so the top Norwegian women are training more than 900 hours per year. What does that mean for everyone else? We chatted with Jodi Hawley, an exercise physiologist who formerly worked with the Canadian National Team for cross-country skiing.